Week 19: Preserve (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2024 Version)

The theme for Week 19 is "Preserve." We preserve a lot as genealogists: papers, stories, history itself. There is also the tasty kind of "preserve." (Now I'm hungry for some strawberry jam on fresh-baked bread.) What have you or your ancestors preserved? Click here to see all the 2024 Themes.

The biggest concern I see among many genealogists, especially the older ones, is who will “Preserve” our research after we are gone. Many of these people state that no one in their family is interested, or they don’t have any children to take over their research.

First of all, as someone who got interested in Genealogy on my own, I didn’t know that my aunt was interested in genealogy. It wasn’t until I went to a family reunion and I saw all the work she had done on her maiden name line. Thus, if you don’t know of anyone in your family who is interested, my question to you “Have you asked everyone?”. If not your children or grandchildren, what about any nieces or nephews or their children or grandchildren? What about your cousins or their children or grandchildren? Perhaps you need to make a bigger search. Get the word out that you are looking for someone to give your research too. You might be surprise who you find hiding in the shadows.

Even though I have warned my children that I will come back and haunt them if they don’t preserve my genealogy, there are no guarantees that they will respect my wishes. Plus, how well will they protect my research? Will it end up in a damp basement to get moldy or in a hot attic with the bugs that will eat my research?

I have decided that the best way to preserve my research is to publish my research in a series of books. I decided that I want to take my immigrant ancestor couples and create descendant books for them. I can then donate those books to various libraries for their collections, especially the FamilySearch Library located in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Now creating these books is not an easy task, and my immigrant ancestor for various lines have arrived in the United States at different times. Thus, some books will be bigger than others, or perhaps split it between two or more volumes. I decided to start with one set of 3rd great grandparents whose line I haven’t done much research on. I had obtained some information on this line from a couple of family history books that were done on two other lines of my family. In one if those books, “The O’Brion Family” the daughter of my ancestral couple is the spouse of the grandson of the primary person of “The O’Brion Family” book. Therefore, some research was already done, and I just have to verify the information. In the other book, the granddaughter of the primary couple is the daughter of the grandson of “The O’Brion Family”. In fact, the information on my direct line was copied from the other book into the "The O’Brion Family" book. When I mean copied, it was actually photocopies of the other book pages. Thus, no new information there!

I hate being critical, but “The O’Brion Family” book format is difficult to follow, because as the author went down the lineage, he didn’t repeat the surname, and thus, I sometimes got lost where in the family I was. Also, he only gave dates, no locations, and thus I have no idea where this family may have been living at the time of the book. However, I did learn what I don’t want in my book. (wink wink).

My main genealogy program is Family Tree Maker and I am lucky that there is a plug-in program, Family Book Creator, that will take the data from my FTM and help produce four types of books, one of them being a descendant book. 

I have done two other books using the plug-in, one for my sister-in-law and the other for her first cousin, as a learning tool to get familiar with the program. They are being sold through lulu on my author's website. 

I am currently on the research step for my book. I have set a goal of finding as many descendants of my ancestral couple. The most difficult step was determining when I am actually done with the research process. I am basically using on-line resources. I may use some in-person research later, if I think more verification is needed.

I am taking a systematic approach, similar to following an outline descendant chart to research all the descendants. Obituaries are wonderful for finding names for the more current generations. Based on these names, I then look for marriage records or indexes that match up to those names and addresses. Using the US Public Records database on Ancestry has allowed me to find birth dates for people who live in the area that is listed on the obituary. Newspapers.com help confirm marriages when announcements list the parents of the married couple, or children names in various articles or birth announcements.

Knowing when to stop researching one family or person and moving onto the next person is the challenge. I have a few designated databases that I check based on the state they appear to be living in. Some states are more helpful than others. Using Ancestry.com hint system when I find a record that I am confident is my person, the additional hints can lead me to more clues. If I don't find anything or can't determine with some confidence that this is my person, I just have to move onto the next person.

Once I am done with the actual research stage of finding names and vital information, I will turn to my DNA match list and see if any matches are showing having a common ancestor with my ancestral couple and verifying if they are in my tree or doing further research to see if I can place them into my tree. I will also look at our shared matches to see if any of them could be added to my family tree.

My last step will be looking at other people’s trees who have my ancestral couple in their tree. My thought is that these trees if also created by direct descendants of my ancestral couple, might help me verify the number of children a couple had, even if they are showing up “living”. Also, the tree owner’s username might be their actual name and aid in verifying my tree. I would hope the tree owner knows who their own parents are, finger’s cross they know who their grandparents are and I can then compare their tree to my tree. This is sometimes how I find young children who died between census years, or who are not mentioned in obituaries and have no gravestone marker to generate a Find A Grave memorial. 

What I am learning from this process? My ancestral couple had a lot more descendants than I realized. That the next book I do, I want to make sure it is for a more recent ancestral couple and do those books before moving to the families that have been in the United States for multiple centuries. My goal is to get as many books done as possible. Thus, looking at the more recent immigrants or even those lines I know that don’t have a lot of descendants, such as my maiden name line. 

How are you going to “Preserve” your genealogy? 

Just have fun and remember Just Do Genealogy!

May’s Theme and Week 18: Love and Marriage (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2024 Version)

The theme for Week 18 is "Love and Marriage." There are so many ways you could approach this theme! Ancestors who got married multiple times; elopement stories; ancestors who were married a long time; or even the surname of Love! Click here to check out all the Themes for 2024.

I use Family Tree Maker for maintaining my genealogy. My main tree which is for my ancestry, shows there are 7,838 marriages for 21,282 people. 

Next, I wondered if I could print a report showing all the marriages. I went to the Publish workspace and under Relationship Reports there is a Marriage Report. This report will list the husband’s name, the wife’s name, their marriage date and relationship, such as Spouse-Ongoing. This report is great to see who is missing a recorded marriage date, I hate to say this, but way too many people. I also noticed that I don’t always have complete names for their spouses either. Then I decided to see how someone who remarried their spouse would show, and it only shows the preferred marriage. There was no option to specify to show alternate marriages. This report ended up being 185 pages long.

Thus, I decided to look if there was any other report about marriages that might be interesting. Under Other, I found a Calendar Report. This report allows you to pick the beginning month and year and how many months you want the calendar for. You can include birthdays, marriages and deaths. Thus, I unchecked the birthdays and deaths and looked at the results. Since I didn’t see my parent’s marriage listed, I looked at people options and realized I need to uncheck “Include births & marriages only if still living.” 

Now my parent’s marriage is showing, however, I wondered if it was cutting some people off because of the font size. I changed the Event font to Extra Small. It appeared to add people to the calendar. I even noticed that there is a checkbox for “use married name for female marriages. However, if unchecked then it cuts people out because of space and I decided I better leave it checked.

As I scrolled through the months, I saw that there were no blank days. Plus, since this is a leap year, I even had one marriage on Feb 29th. I decided to check out 2023 and see what happened to that marriage. It didn’t skip the marriage, but instead added it to Feb 28th, with (Feb 29) placed before the couple’s name.  

This calendar allows you to select just Immediate Family, Extended Family, All Individuals (this is what I selected) and Selected Individuals. 

I decided to try the Selected Individuals and where the marriage date is after 12/31/1899, which stated there was 6348 marriages. There were 1160 marriages before 01/01/1900. Next, I tried marriages after 01/01/1500 and there were 7430. When I tried marriages before 01/01/1500, I had 58 and I noticed an error since I saw people who were included had birth dates of 1923, 1956, 1957, etc… This was because they had a marriage month and day but no year.  Thus, I might want to find an actual year for these individuals. 

I tried seeing how marriages occurred before today (04/26/2024) and it reported 7474. Remember, FTM told me there were 7838 marriages. Plus, the marriages after 12/31/1899 were 6348 and the marriage before 01/01/1900 were 1160 this adds up to 7508. So, I have three different totals. FTM grand total probably includes those with no marriage date, or for people who were married more than once to the same person, such as my great grandparents, which had their preferred marriage only showing on the calendar.

Perhaps the calendar only counts the preferred spouse marriage for those who were marred multiple times.  However, I could not verify this, my uncle’s daughters all were married more than once and I could not find any marriage for them on the calendar. Perhaps there wasn’t room to include them? This is 15 different marriage dates for four female cousins. However, when I selected “Immediate Family” all their marriages were showing on the calendar.

When I selected “Extended Family”, it included my uncle’s wife’s first marriage.

Looking back at the Marriage Report, I see that I have the same "Individuals to include" options and if I want to dive deeper into the the numbers I got when running the calendar, this might be a good report to assist in this process. 

Anyway, this was a very interesting project. I learned that I need to find more marriage dates for people. The Calendar option is fun, perhaps printing one for a family reunion would be cool, keeping in mind that if it is printing preferred marriages, to make sure that the living people have their current spouse as preferred. 

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!